As the Internet permeates further into the functions of society including leisure (e.g., Internet Protocol television (IPTV)) and business (e.g., e-commerce), the capacity and reliability required of routers is steadily increasing. An increase in bandwidth requirements is driving changes in the forwarding hardware and software which are currently tailored towards IP. Such changes may necessitate modification to existing protocols and/or introduction of new protocols. Such new and/or modified protocols have traditionally been tested in labs on a small scale.